Turns out the US government runs a free domain program almost nobody talks about. Under the .us namespace, every city and town can hand out third-level domains like yourname.sanjose.ca.us or yourname.brooklyn.ny.us. No registrar, no $12/year, just a form and some patience. Fred Chan wrote a guide walking through how he actually got one in 2025.
The catch is that each locality has its own delegate — sometimes a city IT department, sometimes a random sysadmin who set it up in 1998 and forgot. Some respond in a day, some never. Fred shows how to look up your delegate via IANA's whois and what to write in the email so it doesn't get ignored.
What I like about this is how delightfully weird the resulting URLs are. amar.gurgaon.hr.in would slap if India had the same system. There's something charming about a domain that tells you exactly where the person lives, like an old-school email signature with a city stamp on it.
If you run a personal site and want something nobody else has, this is worth an afternoon. Worst case you get ghosted, best case you own a piece of internet history that costs zero dollars forever.
